Tag: Sadness

My Christmas Conundrum

I remember vividly my first mother’s day which came about three months after our final failed treatment. My heart was so heavy breathing felt like bench pressing. The intensity of my pain deemed the question “Will I survive?” more than legitimate, my need for self protection fell just short of having to inhabit an actual cocoon.

But recently I found myself thinking, there’s an efficiency to mother’s day the winter holiday season is entirely lacking. Albeit one of the more hard hitting emotional blows that exists, it’s mostly one hit and you’re done. A bit of lead up, nauseating commercialism and some violating conversational recap here and there, but a seasonal noose it is not.

This winter holiday/Christmas thing however is a bonafide MARATHON. And the longer something goes on, the more deeply it begs the question “what to do?”, and in cases of being childless not by choice, “what NOT to do?” Our fourth holiday season out of our final failed treatment and I still have no real answers. Read more →

And the confounding abyss in between

Walking into my first social outing since a virus attacked my autonomic nervous system 5.5 months ago, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Though much less than a few months ago, my nervous system still tends to over assimilate sound and does not adjust smoothly to darkness. Not to mention I’m still dealing with a slowly waning level of dizziness and lightheadedness. And then there’s the fertile world whose presence is, of course, immeasurable. Read more →

I knew entering a nail salon the afternoon before Mother’s Day was not the brightest of moves. It’s about as smart as adopting an indoor porcupine, actually. I live in permanent mockery of my “poor little first world problem”, as I’ve been known to call it – yet my trips to the nail salon have turned fodder for many a blog post. For the involuntarily childless infertility survivor, women + mindlessness is never good. And so off I went, in part because my sweet cousin had just passed away, I was a little shell shocked and knew I’d be on a plane in a couple of days, and in part to treat myself. Read more →

A flashback to this past June, I guess this should have been part 1. But that’s not how I roll.

This past late spring, a peculiar thing started to happen. My physical symptoms of the losses and trauma I had endured started to wane while the “typical” on goings of life became less of an abrasion to my nervous system.

Whispers of normalcy shone through as if they were new inventions. One day while food shopping, my first reaction to a baby crying on and on in Whole Foods was an internal affectionate “aw, someone’s having a fussy day”. It was only 20 minutes later I started to become mildly triggered, which was hardly noticeable in the face of the absence of the gut wrenching feelings of death and despair a baby’s cry used to incite. Read more →

…..THE “WHY DON’T YOU HAVE KIDS?” QUESTION

I’m behind.

I’ve got a long list of posts to complete, some half written, and some that haven’t even made it to keyboard. I haven’t finished my post on that forsaken day back in May which I’m sure no one wants to hear about anyway, and I have yet to write about my personal National Infertility Awareness Week adventures from the end of April. I’ve realized my Why Don’t You Just Adopt Post, smartly called for from all of us by Klara, is not really a can of worms for me but rather a whole friggen boatload, so yeah, that could get messy. Sure, I can do messy, but I need TIME. In my dreams I wanted to make a condensed, easy to read list but we all know THAT rarely happens around here. So between that and the Obama interview given by John La Pook a few months ago that I absolutely have to mock, it’s no wonder I feel a bit inundated. And things were about to clear up so that I could get on this until…..until I went to the nail salon today. Read more →

Why this infertility survivor is NOT off to see the wizard…..

After the group reading for the show Long Island Medium, things continued to head south after my unexpected mini reading with Theresa as I was waiting for my friend to be interviewed with the other interviewees.

“I’m sorry for your loss,” I made eye contact and said to a man who had tragically lost his wife. And I truly meant it. Although he had to have heard my conversation with Theresa loud and clear, he, flanked by his three healthy children, looked at me, nodded, and said thank you. No “and I’m sorry for yours as well”, or “best wishes to you”, or anything. Nothing.

On the way out by the bar, I observed another woman connecting with this gentleman. Even amid this bastion of loss and pain I am still off to the side as usual, unable, through no fault of my own, to connect with anyone. Read more →